Hiya folks,
Maybe someone can help me with this question.
I'm a long time mutt user. However in recent years, I have been a member of an increasing number of mail lists. And an increasing number of mail list users are starting to use special characters in their emails that my terminal is not understanding correctly. When it doesn't understand the character correctly, it starts to interfere with the repaints when I scroll around through messages or through the indexes.
As an example, I believe it was this list where there was recently a discussion regarding Core Duo which included a fancy symbol for (tm) in the subject line. This thread was the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak and I'm now an unhappy Thunderbird user as opposed to a happy mutt user.
So. Clearly I have something set incorrectly so that Mutt (and/or the terminal I am using) do not understand the special characters. Can anyone point me in the right direction to find the answer as to how to fix this so that I can ditch Thunderbird and go back to Mutt?
Thanks for your time.
David Mackintosh wrote:
Hiya folks, So. Clearly I have something set incorrectly so that Mutt (and/or the terminal I am using) do not understand the special characters. Can anyone point me in the right direction to find the answer as to how to fix this so that I can ditch Thunderbird and go back to Mutt?
It works for me with "TERM=gnome mutt".
Ralph
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
David Mackintosh wrote:
Hiya folks, So. Clearly I have something set incorrectly so that Mutt (and/or the terminal I am using) do not understand the special characters. Can anyone point me in the right direction to find the answer as to how to fix this so that I can ditch Thunderbird and go back to Mutt?
It works for me with "TERM=gnome mutt".
Doesn't work. I probably should have mentioned that I see this problem in these terminals:
- putty on windows - xterm on linux - gnome-terminal on linux - multi-gnome-terminal on linux - linux on linux (ie logged into the console)
Doing an export TERM=vt100 before invoking mutt sometimes, but not always, can make some of these problems go away (but not this one).
This is an example of what I am seeing:
http://www.xdroop.com/img/mutt-terminal-drippings.jpg
David Mackintosh wrote:
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
It works for me with "TERM=gnome mutt".
Doesn't work. I probably should have mentioned that I see this problem in these terminals:
- putty on windows
- xterm on linux
- gnome-terminal on linux
- multi-gnome-terminal on linux
- linux on linux (ie logged into the console)
What's the variable "charset" set to in you .muttrc? Does it reflect the locale your system is running?
Ralph
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
What's the variable "charset" set to in you .muttrc? Does it reflect the locale your system is running?
My "charset" value is unset. And how do I check my locale? Is that in /etc/sysconfig/i18n?
[saturn]$ cat i18n LANG="en_US.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
David Mackintosh wrote:
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
What's the variable "charset" set to in you .muttrc? Does it reflect the locale your system is running?
My "charset" value is unset. And how do I check my locale? Is that in /etc/sysconfig/i18n?
[saturn]$ cat i18n LANG="en_US.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
Then try setting
set charset="utf-8" in your .muttrc.
Cheers,
Ralph
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
What's the variable "charset" set to in you .muttrc? Does it reflect the locale your system is running?
My "charset" value is unset. And how do I check my locale? Is that in /etc/sysconfig/i18n?
[saturn]$ cat i18n LANG="en_US.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
Then try setting
set charset="utf-8" in your .muttrc.
That didn't work. However, when I set charset="utf-8" in my .muttrc, and told Putty to use utf-8 encoding (change settings -> Window -> Translation; Received data assumed to be in which character set: UTF-8) it did work.
Is there a quick primer on charsets and encoding on the internet I can refer to so that I can learn about all this?
Thanks for your pointer getting me going in the right direction.
On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, David Mackintosh wrote:
Is there a quick primer on charsets and encoding on the internet I can refer to so that I can learn about all this?
Thorough, not so quick:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
Quick, not so thorough:
http://www.madboa.com/geek/utf8/
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 08:59:32AM -0800, Paul Heinlein wrote:
Is there a quick primer on charsets and encoding on the internet I can refer to so that I can learn about all this?
Thorough, not so quick:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
Quick, not so thorough:
Perfect. Thanks all.
On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Ralph Angenendt wrote:
David Mackintosh wrote:
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
What's the variable "charset" set to in you .muttrc? Does it reflect the locale your system is running?
My "charset" value is unset. And how do I check my locale? Is that in /etc/sysconfig/i18n?
Just run /usr/bin/locale in your terminal. The key value is LC_CTYPE, which specifies characters and case conversion.
You can test your terminal's ability to handle various locales with a simple script:
----- %< ----- #!/bin/bash LANG=C for loc in $(locale -a | grep utf8 | sort); do echo "Locale: $loc" # Aug 1, 2004 was a Sunday, Aug 7 a Saturday for n in $(seq 1 7); do LANG="$loc" date +"%A (%a)" -d 2004/8/${n} done for n in $(seq 1 12); do LANG="$loc" date +"%B (%b)" -d 2004/${n}/1 done echo done ----- %< -----
On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 11:08:17AM -0500, David Mackintosh wrote:
Ralph Angenendt wrote:
David Mackintosh wrote:
Hiya folks, So. Clearly I have something set incorrectly so that Mutt (and/or the terminal I am using) do not understand the special characters. Can anyone point me in the right direction to find the answer as to how to fix this so that I can ditch Thunderbird and go back to Mutt?
It works for me with "TERM=gnome mutt".
Doesn't work. I probably should have mentioned that I see this problem in these terminals:
- putty on windows
- xterm on linux
- gnome-terminal on linux
- multi-gnome-terminal on linux
- linux on linux (ie logged into the console)
Doing an export TERM=vt100 before invoking mutt sometimes, but not always, can make some of these problems go away (but not this one).
This is an example of what I am seeing:
David:
I occasionally see display corruption in Mutt too. It always goes away (temporarily) by refreshing the screen with a CTRL-L, which leads me to believe it may be either a curses or terminal behavior problem.
So far I haven't figured out what it could be, and when I attempt to reproduce it so I can report it, it tends to be not reproducible.
I see it most often, though not exclusively, when at work using a VPN to connect to my home box for purposes of reading mail. I'm using the same Linux at work, and using the default gnome terminal I also use at home, where I hardly ever observe the problem.
-
David Mackintosh -
fredex -
Paul Heinlein -
Ralph Angenendt